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Great {Customer} Expectations
Operational Excellence at Dow Corning.
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Dow Corning studies customer behavior and aligns information access to multi-channel sales and marketing
One way to describe great customer service is the shortest route to a desired outcome. It is partly because of this definition that customers are increasingly seeking product information and self-service procurement through the Web. Yet in the business world, customer quests are usually more complicated than punching a SKU into an order entry system. It remains the work of sales teams in every industry to establish relationships and build trust with customers through understanding their needs and addressing them in a timely and efficient manner.
As the online purchasing model gains footing, businesses need to very carefully coordinate, align and sometimes realign direct sellers, channel partners and Web self-service to meet customer desires in the most efficient way possible. But the three channels remain hugely uncoordinated and fragmented—and no boon to the customer—because to choose one channel is usually to abandon another, which might happen more than once. What often makes a business-to-business Web site great is the alignment of direct and channel sales information through the use of common systems and common resources. Where wildly optimistic B2B e-markets of the early decade fell short in this sense, responsibility returned to suppliers to manage customer relationships, with emphasis on both words.
At a very high level, Dow Corning – the global leader in silicon-based products and technology – is almost entirely a B2B company. If its products seem to be of a commodity nature, Dow Corning’s customers represent an incredibly diverse set of specialized industries: aerospace, beauty and personal care, appliances, semiconductors, food and beverage, oil and gas, pulp and paper, solar and many more. Dow’s customer facing workers are about half direct sellers and half distribution and channel partners. The field sellers work through the normal modes of direct contact while a section of the sales staff works with the distributors on channel management and the growth of their respective businesses.
To an increasing degree, customer interactions are managed directly on the Web, through dowcorning. com and xiameter.com, Dow Corning’s high-volume, market-based selling channel with set business rules and fewer service requirements. It now falls to Chip Reeves, who holds the unusual title of Director, Marketing and Sales Process, to lead the convergence of customer relationship management (CRM), e-business and compliance across both sales and marketing at Dow Corning through effective use of information. “There are two sides to our CRM face,” Reeves says. “One is the face of the customer experience on the Web site, that’s kind of the outside in, making sure that the service and experience customers get in terms of information and support is consistent with their experience with Dow Corning either directly or through our channel partners. It’s largely looking at the ways the customer interacts with us.” The inside face of CRM Reeves describes is the operational excellence Dow Corning is building across its sales force and in support of its distributor efforts. These internal efforts are all about positioning sellers and channel partners to effectively respond and proactively support customer inquiries directly or via dowcorning.com.
{Outside In:
Customer Experience
While the Web is at the forefront of future interactivity, the focus is on the audience, not the Web site. Though Dow Corning went through the usual steps of site design and redesign, a big step forward was orienting dowcorning.com toward finding information in the different ways customers might look for it. “We did a lot of ethnographic research with customers to see what they were doing and how they were looking and developed some insight in terms of keywords and even the vocabulary we should be using,” Reeves says. What Dow Corning is doing with its ‘product finder’ is to allow multiple paths to the same information and to allow the customer, based on the choices they make using controlled vocabulary, find their way around.
The product finder, which came through work with technology partner Endeca, immediately reduced site clutter, but required customer usage analysis in ways that weren’t as intuitive as they seemed. “What we used to have was essentially a database customers could find their way into,” says Reeves. “You might find our solutions for airbag coatings, but you would need to know we hardwire that into our chemicals industry under performance coatings, and if you’d happened to think automotive—why would you ever think that?—you wouldn’t have found your way to the same information.” The team draws on a variety of business to consumer best practices to improve that whole environment with attributes that narrow choice but retain a flavor for all the many choices on the site. The Endeca solution has also been applied to Dow Corning’s technical library to assist sales staff as well as customers to the information assets they are seeking, sometimes in combination.
Not just hierarchy or taxonomy, it is logic that addresses the human process of information quests. Reeves and his team are still in the process of learning, adapting and improving categories and the sequences in which customers and sales reps refine questions in their normal behavior.
{Web and Working Roles
The customer experience learning resulted in some adjustments to staffing and resource allocation. Originally as an experiment, Dow Corning added interactive live help to its Web site. “We weren’t out chasing the sun, staffing that on a global basis had implications for us,” says Reeves. Instead, the project was paid for and expanded incrementally, starting regionally with regular North American business hours.
As it turned out, the “experiment” justified increased investment, and not just for the sake of customers. “I think there are situations where resellers, distributors etc. who need quick field support have probed that route because of the responsiveness of the team behind that on our internal technical information side.” This was never a primary strategy for live help, yet now it can complement customer service with a single version of truth for resellers to share and use to entangle with customers.
In the same way, Dow Corning hosts regular Web seminars, educational and or promotional-oriented activities that tend to align with vertical industries and the way the company goes to market. This certainly helps with lead generation, and like many companies, Dow Corning funnels back end attendance data into opportunity development and then measures the ultimate impact. But the underlying strategy ensures that a healthy number of resellers and distributors are in attendance along with customers.
{Inside Out:
Operational Excellence
Simplifying CRM is something most companies want to do but don’t have a lot to say about. To its benefit, Dow Corning has had a strong process orientation going back to its mid-90s transactional overhaul. “One of the things we did that’s carried over to a lot of our approach is that we have a single SAP ERP instance globally and it operates across languages and boundaries,” says Reeves. Likewise, Dow Corning switched from Siebel to SAP CRM and also leverages SAP’s NetWeaver, Business Warehouse (BW) and Portal applications. While benefits of standardization are apparent, they raise challenges to engrained ways of working and require getting the right “fit” so channels can agree the processes will work for them. “At a baseline it lets us focus on what we think are the common denominators of a process we need to support, like the opportunity process,” says Reeves. “What can we strip away that has been added on over time? Process design by committee starts to make things heavy. You need to tear into that and reframe it and simplify it. It’s a lot of work.”
CRM is more than the CRM application; it is as much the linkages to a variety of system access points so a day in the life of a seller plays out through a sales portal. Some of those access points are in SAP CRM and many are not. Much more comes from back end supply information in terms of open orders and consignment inventory levels and pay performance that need to be accessible to sales through the portal—and increasingly through mobile-friendly devices. Dow Corning’s Blackberry deployments now contain a set of what Reeves calls customer quick links, mobile-friendly characterizations of SAP BW reports for specific slices of perspective. “If I’m a sales person, I want real time open orders, sales for a given customer, that kind of thing. I don’t want everything on my Blackberry, I want low input/high output kind of applications where you do a little typing but get a lot of information back.”
While Reeves says Dow Corning might not be the poster child for mobile productivity, he can point to proofs of concept in areas such as qualified lead follow-up. “When we capture a lead from the Web site, we can now pull a thread through a story. We’ve captured an interaction, a customer request, something off our Web site, maybe a form that gets sent to customer service, but it’s also going to go automatically into the SAP CRM backbone as an activity. It might be qualified up as something our direct sales or channel partner should look at.” When the internal qualification group decides a lead requires direct follow-up, Outlook sends an email to a Blackberry containing a URL link to a mobile friendly BW screen with details about the opportunity. The seller can update or reject the email without ever opening a CRM application.
These applications are not just clever innovations; they are Generation 1 tests used internally for productivity and effectiveness. “We don’t want people to type up call reports on a mobile but following up a quick lead, change status, that’s pretty clean,” says Reeves. “That’s the kind of thing we’re looking for.”
{Summing Up
In one sense, Reeves’ unusual job title explains a good bit of Dow Corning’s progress. Few companies create a cycle of awareness to issues of customer needs and behavior, reflect on channel tactics, reach to better knowledge, adjust information access and selling and marketing processes, measure satisfaction and then look for the lagging indicators of success.
“There is no single magic metric of success, the middle part is the toughest stuff, the real-time indicators that get into the actual engagement with the pipeline of activity,” he says. “It’s the lagging indicators everybody wants to report and that’s an easy metric to look at. But what’s really driving that is a harder connection to make.” A rational technology foundation is part of this, but the nature of the engagement and high-level control of the quality and uniformity of shared information access is what really affects the buying cycle and success generally.
Clearly, Dow Corning started with the view of the customer on the outside looking in. “We spent a lot of time on the Web accessibility,” says Reeves. “The thought process which has played out to be true is when you sort that out for the customer you are making it easier for your own support people to find that information. If you approach it only as an internal exercise you might improve things internally but not help the customer experience at all.” The inside approach starts with the salesperson, what they need to effectively support and develop the customer relationships—and needs to be a broader discussion than the traditional definitions around CRM, Reeves says. “I don’t want to belittle SFA, it’s an important part of the opportunity pipeline and a critical lifeblood inside the space. But serving customers is a lot more than SFA in terms of the information salespeople need access to.”
Jim Ericson is editorial director of DM Review, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com.
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